Questions about tomato flowers and cross pollination

General Discussions
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Hello!

This year I am spending a lot of time looking at tomato flowers from several varieties I am growing out including Mission Mountain, selections from panamorous that I grew last year and others.

I am flagging plants with exserted stimgas and I am hoping to keep selecting for them in future generations to encourage crosses.

In all this looking at flowers over the last weeks I have a few questions that came up that I couldn’t answer…

  1. Some plants have flowers that seem to always be exserted from the time they open. Others exsert their stigma at different times. I wonder if someone can explain when the pollen receptivity is the most important. Does a flower need to have its stigma exserted already by the time it opens to be open to cross pollination? For these plants that exsert their stigmas at different times (and it seems to be somewhat variable by each flower on the same plant) is the chance of cross pollination much less than plants with flowers whose stigmas are always exserted?

  2. Likewise what about stigmas that are just barely exserted, as in the green tip is just showing out of the bottom of the cone or in line with the bottom of the cone?

  3. What about flowers who’s stigmas have seemingly thrust through the side of the cone and sticking out more or less sideways from an otherwise closed cone?

  4. If the flower is aimed sideways vs down does it have more chance for crossing? I am assuming yes since pollen will likely shed downward from gravity, but perhaps wind is also a factor. Thoughts on that?

  5. I noticed a plant that has a different number of petals on one flower than the rest. That one flower has 6 petals while the rest are 5. Is this an indication of a mutation and the possibility that the children have different traits?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!!

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I have definitely noticed that more is better when it comes to style length on tomato flowers when you are looking for natural cross pollination. However, as long as the stigma sticks out a bit there is a chance for cross pollination. I would assume that if it sticks out from the beginning it is better. I also think that a flower that has an exserted stigma early can probably be deliberately hand pollinated with pollen of your choice without emasculation before it sheds any pollen of its own.

The best answers can probably be found by calculating percentages of crossed offspring in saved seeds. So, if you find and flag a plant with what you believe to be good exsertion or perhaps a particular type of exsertion. If that plant also happens to have an obvious recessive trait such as rugose dwarfing or potato leaves then you can grow out the seedlings and find out how many of them are likely selfed and how many are likely crossed.

For instance, this year in the tasty promiscuous patch descended from the plant I called “The One” about four years ago, there was a potato leaf rugose dwarf with strong anthocyanin and good flavor. If it has an outcrossing rate some of the seedlings will be non-dwarf and or regular leaved.

With Mission Mountain Sunrise (MMS) which was one of my first crosses and the founding variety from which the Mission Mountain grex is descended being a potato leaved tomato most likely descended from Joseph’s “Brad” there are a lot of potato leaf tomatoes that segregate out of my tomatoes. I think I selected Mission Mountain Morning (MMS x Big Hill) back for potato leaf for instance and mixed it into the Mission Mountain grex I offered on EFN.

I was using potato leaf to check for crosses awhile back (Like say 2017) and not all potato leaf plants I found with exsertion had resulting natural crosses- those with more exsertion did though.

When I deliberately was selecting Exserted Orange and Exserted Tiger both unrelated domestic lines for exsertion I was selecting for plants with a lot of exsertion and by that, I mean very long styles. I started doing the same with Mission Mountain Morning- but haven’t been working at it last year or this year because I am now working on their children and grandchildren varieties. I made enough crosses with Exserted Orange, Exserted Tiger, and Mission Mountain Morning to move on from those three to their descendants including some crosses between them.

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Hey @WilliamGrowsTomatoes thank you so much for taking the time to reply!

I absolutely enjoyed growing Mission Mountain Grex this year, it was my favorite variety to grow and so fun with all the diversity! All the tomatoes were tasty too!

By now I’ve already finished selecting seed from this year. But your feedback has confirmed the conclusion I was coming to with regard to longer styles and earlier exposure meaning more cross pollination opportunities.

Originally I was going to select any exserted stigma and have a bit of extra emphasis on the ones that were more prominent and more consistently visible.

As the season progressed I decided to change my approach and only select from the longest styles and more consistently visible stigmas. It would limit the diversity more but have more opportunity for outcrossing.

I’m really wanting to maximize the chance for natural outcrossing and I’m not interested in hand pollinating at this point.

It seems that one of the side effects of selecting for more visible stigmas is that I am putting more emphasis on some of the mission mountain tomatoes that have lots of lobes because those flowers are bigger and their stigmas are much fatter and substantial.

I am also selecting for an emphasis on what I consider to be the best flavors, which for my and our family’s palate tends to be higher on the acidic level.

I am hoping to find more sources of tomatoes with reliably exserted stigmas to add to the mix next year, we’d especially like to have some black beefsteak style tomatoes included which didn’t seem represented in MM grex, but open to anything larger than cherry size really. But outside of your and Joseph’s work I’m not sure how to find varieties with exserted stigmas… do you have any suggestions in that regard? Or perhaps its worth posting another thread on that topic.

Thanks for confirming that note about crossing not being dependent on potato leaf. I kinda figured that was the case because I noticed no visible stigmas in some of the potato leaf plants I grew this year.

p.s. Please excuse my delay but it’s been a busy harvest and seed cleaning time.

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I will point out here that some of the potentially most resilient and adaptable tomatoes in the Mission Mountain Grex are cherry tomatoes that should have a lower percentage of elongated styles, especially in the extreme form with the most exserted stigmas they are rather more likely to have modestly exserted stigmas. The cherry tomatoes in the grex come in large part from wild current tomato crosses. Wild current tomatoes have substantially more genetic diversity than domestic tomatoes. Selecting larger tomatoes from the grex will probably result in a fully domestic selection like the potato leaf blue bicolor strain I call Mission Mountain Morning. In the future I don’t plan to reoffer any fully domestic tomatoes, not even in a Grex. I now have about 45 crosses with recent wild ancestry including some back crosses to the larger tomatoes for size recovery. Size recovery is more difficult than I would assume- I grew out a lot of F2 1/2 and 1/4 current crosses this year and most were still cherry sized so I think it will take large growouts of 1/4 F2 crosses to recover larger sizes. I assume with so many crosses that I’ll also recover exserted stigmas in some of them. I realized just this year that it is important to me philosophically towards contributing to a future of resilient tomatoes to make double crosses that result in Wild x Local x Fancy tomatoes so that in the future we can have fancy locally adapted tomatoes with resilient and adaptable genetics.

I bred Exserted Tiger from Lee Goodwin’s Blue Ambrosia. Neither Exserted Tiger nor Blue Ambrosia is represented in the Mission Mountain Grex and are thus unrelated lines though I consider both to be fully domestic and therefore from a relatively low genetic diversity group. Both are cherry tomatoes. Lee does have some tomatoes with wild parentage that he has bred available on his website you might also consider exploring his entire Ambrosia line as it is all related to a Sungold dehybridization he did. Sungold sometimes segregates out exsertion. J&L Exclusive Varieties : Zen Cart!, The Art of E-commerce

Alan Kapuler who wrote the very interesting article on occasionally outcrossing tomatoes bred a good number of varieties with at least some wild ancestry and I’ve seen some modest exsertion there and also got at least one new natural cross in a packet directly from Alan. Alan’s daughter is continuing his work and I haven’t explored all of their varieties. https://peaceseedlingsseeds.blogspot.com/ Alan did introduce some wild genes to his tomatoes.

Exsertion is often unreliable. Natural crosses tend to be with inserted types and have to be carefully reselected for extreme exsertion if desired. It also varies from year-to-year and is dependent on weather and climate in part for expression. It is also tremendously dependent upon bumblebees to work- unless you daub some pollen on yourself in addition to what the bumblebees transfer. Fortunately, when I manage to find even one plant with extreme exsertion- it will often have a few to many natural crosses in its offspring. I find those natural crosses easier to find if the exserted mother happens to be potato leaf, rugose dwarf or both as those are recessive traits that will be absent in new crosses. Though with Blue Ambrosia, a regular leaf indeterminate, I simply waited until the fruit was mature the second year and saved seed from the most likely crosses based on fruit size and color. Oh, another note on exsertion and climate- some forms of exsertion get longer with more heat and may not get pollinated beyond a certain point resulting in less resilient tomatoes in hot climates- there may be an optimal length or some value to maintaining a mix of style lengths and genetically different exsertion sources.

Heirloom potato leaf tomatoes are supposed to be a pretty good source of exserted stigmas and if you can find a good one you’ll easily be able to recognize any crosses with regular leaf plants. I haven’t searched extensively and most of the potato leaf strains I have tried are actually early modern short season strains. Of those I’ve seen with exsertion I would rate them as modest and not extreme in that character. They are of course fully domestic.

Some of the wild unpalatable species have exserted stigmas with some accessions perhaps more than others but breeding these back to palatability is a difficulty.

I don’t know of a nice large purple/chocolate/black large tomato with exsertion but you might explore the potato leaf heirlooms. Craig Le’Houllier got a couple natural crosses on his extensive heirloom collection that way. Lucky Cross Tomato - Victory Seeds® – Victory Seed Company Tomatoes here tend to do better if they are a bit on the small size judging from most northern adapted early modern strains- though the bigger they are the more efficient they are to pick. I did get at least one black type in the segregations I got from Joseph’s project over the years- I think I replanted it in last year’s grex. Not sure if it reappeared. I’ve made crosses with Dwarf Mocha’s Cherry and Purple Zebra F1 tomato but both are quite small fruited. In general the last several year’s wild crossing work has netted me a very large amount of cherry tomatoes. Size recovery is definitely on my mind though!

In 2017 when I had my initial idea to try to breed direct seeded tomatoes for Montana I tried a large number of tomato varieties but also included some variable populations especially from Joseph. These were skewed strongly to short season and it is possible that short season tomatoes tend to be early modern tomatoes and may have already undergone selection for short styles with inserted stigmas. I then read the interesting article by Alan Kapuler as well as Joseph’s writings and searched this garden for exserted stigmas and found Blue Ambrosia with a very long style. Perhaps a 1/70 to 1/100 event though slightly and modestly exserted varieties were much more common. There aren’t a lot of great options for exserted tomatoes out there in my experience. This is a lot of why I worked so hard to reselect and stabilize the trait in Exserted Tiger, Exserted Orange, and Mission Mountain Morning- so there could be more. However, in doing I ended up with a lot of fully domestic tomatoes which while they outcross at a reasonable rate probably don’t contain the diversity needed for more adaptable and resilient tomatoes. So, I would challenge you to cross with something with less of a genetic bottleneck like a current tomato or any tomato from South America and then reselect (perhaps just some of) the offspring for this long style / exserted stigma trait. Tomatoes that did not make the trip to Europe and back like many varieties from Mexico and central America would be a nice second choice as well any current tomato may be somewhat useful. Though the more common the strain of current tomato the more likely it has already been crossed with extensively by others or even by the occasional natural cross. Red/yellow/orange current tomatoes tend to carry their genetic diversity across accessions/varieties rather than within accessions. So, using lots of varieties is essential with current tomatoes. Vs. working with the unpalatable green obligate outcrossers which have much more within accession diversity because of the heterozygosity enforced by the obligate outcrossing. Which is of course why Joseph Lofthouse has devoted a great deal of effort to trying to transfer that set of obligate outcrossing traits itself into eating tomatoes- because it would allow the resulting tomatoes to maintain heterozygosity and more diversity at the genetic level.

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This is a brilliant analysis. Thanks!

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I want to add that the realization came in explaining my tomato projects to a member of my extended family. I was trying to simplify it and distill it down- and it worked. I made an important realization myself. Without the wild element the fancy new short season crosses I’ve created are hollow and don’t contribute to the sustainability of tomatoes- however without the fancy or the local element you would likely have tomatoes that aren’t exciting enough to attract folks to seed save them.

These ideas that Alan Kapuler and Joseph Lofthouse articulated that by increasing the crossing rate on tomatoes we can increase the adaptability of tomatoes is why domestic exserted tomatoes like Joseph’s Big Hill also known as HX-9 are foundational to my own breeding efforts. Joseph’s more recent tomatoes which contain wild genetics: like the obligate outcrossing line he is working on may be even more useful in this regard. In my garden the older promiscuous lines from Joseph’s project led me to try to stabilize the best flavors I found- that line has never stabilized and I am certain it has now crossed with the Mission Mountain tomatoes I created. This year a rugose dwarf bicolor potato leaf anthocyanin skinned tomato showed up years ahead of schedule. I can simply grow its seed to get an idea of its outcrossing rate with other plants in that tomato patch. Last year an exserted potato leaf anthocyanin red showed up in the promiscuous patch- and I grew it again this year near a number of current crosses- any regular leaf plant from that seed packet is likely to be a fairly exciting cross. Though these two tomatoes are only about 1/8 wild from Joseph’s breeding as they outcrossed to my domestic anthocyanin tomatoes. That is probably about as low as I would like to go on wild parentage. So, it might be time to plant them next to some wild or wilder tomatoes and see if I can find any regular leaf crosses.

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Im working on a tomato project with the following goals:

  • can be direct seeded and harvested in my short growing season
  • some decent level of natural crossing (I dont plan on doing manual crosses)
  • high genetic diversity
  • tasty tomatoes
  • one unique population with varied tomato types

For 2025 I’m planning to direct seed 3000+ seeds (planning on single digit % success rate/selection) and have the following seeds:

  • second generation from my direct seeded Q-series and Wildling (EFN) from 2024
  • Exserted Orange, Big Hill , Mission mountain sunrise (from snake river - they sell 2 gram packages)

I have the amount of seed I need, but I was wondering if there are other sources that would complement my project. I wonder if I have enough genetic diversity as it seems some of those are 100% domestic.

Thanks

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Hi Patate,

I consider Exserted Orange, Big Hill, and Mission Mountain Sunrise to be fully domestic and of the three Mission Mountain Sunrise has the least exsertion of styles and stigmas which is why I crossed it to Big Hill in my own garden. Q series and Wildling are two named groups from Joseph’s wild crosses which he calls his beautifully promiscuous and tasty tomato project. Here I have found the Lofthouse promiscuous tomatoes adaptable to direct seeding. Last Year’s promiscuous offering from Going to Seed was largely a direct seeded grow out I did of Joseph’s promiscuous project it worked very well here. My advice on direct seeding is to prepare the garden well and then as early as twenty days before average last frost seed them. I use a mechanical seeder. I plan to offer two breeder’s grexes of seed for 2025 through my wife’s Etsy seed company Smashflower. The Mission Mountain crosses with wild current tomatoes and the 2024 descendants of the tasty line I’ve been trying wildly unsuccessfully to stabilize of Joseph’s promiscuous project. I think the latter has crossed with my anthocyanin tomatoes but neither orange fruit nor anthocyanin skin is nearly as prevalent as I would have expected this year. Lots of small red cherries in both grexes.

Depending on what we get back for seed at Going to Seed we may divide a few tomato mixes or just have one. I hope folks will return a good amount of Lofthouse promiscuous tomato project seed so we can offer something similar to last year’s offering.

How long is your frost-free growing season?

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Thanks for summarizing things for me William!

My frost-free growing season is probably around 110 days, and was longer this year. But I wonder if I have a growing degree day issue, as for example my Lofthouse melon didn’t ripen in time when I tried it this summer.

I direct seeded ~150-200 seeds of Q-series/wildlings after the last frost date and got ripe fruit from around 10 plants. One plant I called " twice as fast" caught up with transplants and produced a ripe fruit last day of August.

I’ve noted the 2-3 week before last frost recommendation, and will try to add more seeds with wild genetics. I guess I do have 1000+ seeds from my Q-series/wildlings but could diversify a bit.

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I think you will very likely find that the 10 survivors will produce offspring that also survive upping your percentages considerably.

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I think so too! And I’m planning to have another hard selection this year.

I think direct seeding allows an amateur breeder to select among thousands of seeds, something we wouldn’t do in the greenhouse.

Raoul Robinson suggested that potato breeding clubs sow 100k TPS each year in order to achieve horizontal resistance to potato diseases.

I don’t think we need those numbers for our more modest goals, but I think that direct seeding allows trialing a magnitude or two more seeds than with transplants.

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William, I want to thank you for all the information that you’ve shared in reply to my questions. I have re-read your posts a few times and I am learning a lot. Likely I will continue re-read what you’ve shared in the coming seasons as I absorb this knowledge around exsertion and outcrossing. Thank you!

I also appreciate the links and feedback about possible other varieties to try that may have exserted stigmas or wild parentage. I’ll check them out!

When you refer to the wild cherry tomatoes in your MM Grex, I think you’re referring to the very dark cherries that tend to be a darker red on the lower portion and have a nice red star pattern under the calyxes. I absolutely love those cherry tomatoes visually and many of them have amazing flavors. The only downside which I think you referred to is that they take a long time to ripen. I am saving seeds from the most exserted stigmas from the best tasting cherries from this years grow out.

Now that I know they are wild or more wild I will gladly take your advice and continue to include some of those in my mix in future seasons.

I am not hand pollinating and I am not tracking lineage in my mix/grex and I don’t really plan to in the future. That is one of the attractive things to me about landrace gardening. My personality is not suited to meticulous record keeping of lineage and it also allows me to take on more grex projects.

My goal with selecting for exserted stigmas, and any interesting crosses that I may notice in the future is to encourage possible natural crosses and local adaptation, while maintaining some higher than average level of genetic diversity in the grex.

With that in mind, and since I won’t be keeping close track of crosses, I’m curious how you may suggest maintaining an “appropriate” level of wild genetics in the mix going forward? Is there any way to roughly gauge the “wildness” of a tomato without knowing its lineage?

When you say wild “current” tomatoes I think you’re referring to “currant” tomatoes. I did notice currant size tomato in a few plants I grew out from MM Grex. They were bright orange and somewhat oblong, their leaves were lighter colored than other plants in the grex. They had a nice sour note when they were not quite ripe or just ripe, and I’m not sure if it was the visual color and shape or what, but they reminded me of kumquat flavor. I love their flavor and enjoyed snacking on them in the garden but because of their size they were impractical in the kitchen and to be honest for that reason I did not save their seeds. The few that I grew did not seem to have exserted stigmas which is another reason I didn’t save seeds. Would you recommend to keep some in the mix going forward to insure more wild pollen is available?

I’m not quite understanding how you know the larger tomatoes out of your crosses can’t carry much wild genes but I believe you! I still want to have larger tomatoes in the mix because we enjoy the efficiency in the kitchen and harvesting as you mentioned, but based on your feedback my mix won’t be exclusively big or “fancy” to keep some more wild genetics around.

Other than that I do really look forward to see how your work goes with breeding fancy tomatoes that have wild genetics and I do look forward to see how Joseph’s obligate outcrossing work goes!

Thanks again for the time you’ve taken to share your wisdom :pray: :green_heart:

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Most cherry tomatoes in the grex have wild parentage- especially the longer season ones. Though even with cherry tomatoes there will be some crosses with Sweet Cherriette which itself probably has some currant tomato parentage but which I put in the domestic category mentally because we don’t know the full details of its parentage other than it is a Tim Peters bred tomato. Interestingly the crosses with Sweet Cherriette are much earlier than the crosses with the wild currant tomatoes. The cherries with the most exserted stigmas are likely recessive and by saving them preferentially you will probably get both wild genetics and a higher potential for further outcrossing.

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Bright orange could be from the Solanum galapagense cross. Smaller size could happen with any of the currant crosses. Yes, I frequently type current when I mean currant. I recommend keeping all the cherry tomato variation at least in small quantities. Exserted stigma ancestry is in all of them, it will segregate out in some plants and not in others.

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It is a low percentage of size recovery from segregation. It is possible, it just is rare. Joseph’s strain that we called XL red is a case where we got quite a large red tomato back from a wild cross. In my 2024 garden where I grew lots of segregating F2’s and new outcrosses to larger tomatoes good size on the currant crosses was still quite unusual.

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I plan to periodically save seed from potato leaf plants (recessive) with excellent style and stigma exsertion. I thenwill plant those plants next to a currant tomato from South America either from the Galapagos islands or mainland. Then I will save lots of seeds and look for regular leaf (dominant) seedlings. If those seedlings produce cherry tomatoes I will know I have a wild cross F1. I then will save lots of seed from those regular leaf cherry tomatoes and grow them out and reselect potato leaf plants with good exsertion in the F2. I then will use those potato leaf plants as a mother row with any favorite tomato plants nearby. Keeping an eye out for regular leaf seedlings of potato leaf plants, and potato leaf seedlings of regular leaf plants gives me a strong ability to tell that my tomato plants are making new crosses. In my own garden I plan to eventually eliminate the strains that I see as fully domestic which will eliminate crosses with them. Actually, since I have more than six gardens, I may be growing fully domestic plants in only one of them as soon as next year. I am still looking to add some traits from domestic- though the deeper genetic diversity comes from the wild- the domestic are a good source of different colors and flavors.

The wildness of tomatoes has no real tell when working with the easy palatable species. Especially since currant tomatoes have been crossed with many common and uncommon tomato varieties like Stupice and Farthest North and some of those show leaf characters from their currant ancestors. The difficult unpalatable species can have very odd characteristics for generations- often in leaf shape.

One work around might be to start with a wild mother such as a currant tomato and cross in and reselect for stigma and style exsertion- then always save your grex seed from your known wild cross lineage maternal line.

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Some of my currant crossed tomatoes that happened on their own six or seven years ago are the earliest to ripen of all my tomatoes. They have lots of variation in size from that of a pea to that of a ping pong ball. Also, lots of variation in color, shape and flavor.

All of them though, have the currant looking leaves and usually have little brown or black spots on bottom leaves of small plants, sometimes even on the cotyledons. It doesn’t seem to hurt anything, and it doesn’t spread to other plants. I guess it is a disease of some type, but I just consider it more of a trait.

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There is a good history to this phenomenon. Farthest North was bred in North Dakota in 1934 from a cross with Bison Farthest North Tomato - Victory Seeds® – Victory Seed Company

Stupice, Stupice - Tatiana's TOMATOBase is also from a cross with currant tomatoes though it is listed as a three-way cross and so it is uncertain if it is 1/4 or 1/2 but either way a high percentage.

Amongst the Dwarf Tomato project two cherry tomatoes were bred by crossing with currant tomatoes Dwarf Eagle Smiley Dwarf Eagle Smiley Tomato - Victory Seeds® – Victory Seed Company and Dwarf Johnson’s Cherry Dwarf Johnson's Cherry Tomato - Victory Seeds® – Victory Seed Company

It strikes me that these existing known currant crosses are probably very good starting places to work with. Towards that I crossed Dwarf Eagle Smiley with my Mission Mountain Morning x LA1375 currant tomato cross in 2023. The resulting F1 was extremely tasty in 2024. So, I think Dwarf Eagle Smiley is likely a very good tomato to make crosses with without sacrificing too much. I’ve also managed crosses with Dwarf Johnson’s Cherry and Farthest North. I’ve currently got my three Farthest North crosses sorted into my fully domestic tomatoes- but actually they are 1/4 currant even though that cross was likely made close to 100 years ago for Farthest North to have been released 90 years ago in 1934. Though the breeder was known to do greenhouse generations to speed up his tomato breeding even back then so that might have gotten him the 7 generations to stability in just 4 years- even then the cross would have been made in 1930 at latest 94 years ago. Farthest North is an ancestor of many other short season tomatoes with known pedigrees. For instance I think that the variety Sandpoint bred in Idaho and released in 1978 has a bit of Farthest North in it via the Subarctic Series bred in Alberta for which it was an ancestor. So, who knows how many of the early tomatoes have a bit of Farthest North in them?! Any that didn’t reinvent the wheel and resulted from crosses with existing very early tomatoes might. So, I am not sure if my crosses with Farthest North should get credit from me for the wild genes or not since that ancestry is so well established in the tomatoes already available- it doesn’t contribute anything new to adding genetic diversity to tomatoes.

With currant crosses being earlier- I was very interested to see that my Sweet Cherriette crosses are earlier than my wild accession currant crosses. Sweet Cherriette has an unknown percentage of currant ancestry but it obviously got quite a bit based on fruit size and leaves. Still, while bringing size down by crossing to currants does make for earlier tomatoes, there must be more earliness genes at play in some ultra early varieties like Sweet Cherriette. Though it is entirely possible that some currant tomato accessions have better genes for earliness than others and could be the source of some of the earliness genes in many popular early tomatoes. One reason for that is that they tend to be cornfield weeds in traditional corn growing areas and probably have been naturally selected in that environment for weediness. Not all accessions of wild currant tomatoes are collected from those ag field environments though so there is probably variation within currant tomatoes for weediness and its associated earliness.

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Ah, so it takes seven years, I’ve wondered about that. I assume that means you have to track just one of each generation to really know what you have and I’m not good at that. I’ve just let mine grow mostly wild and more than one each year, so I have no idea what is really going on except that new ones keep showing up.

One this year was extra special on flavor, and I kept it’s seeds separately to plant next year. It wasn’t the earliest one to ripen but two days ago on Nov. 15 we had them in a salad and they are still producing. What is unusual is the flavor is still outstanding while usually tomatoes that ripen after it starts getting cooler do not taste nearly as good as those that ripened while it was still warm at night. A couple of light frosts is all we’ve had so far, and it didn’t hurt them at all.

I don’t remember where my original currant seeds came from, I had them when I lived in town. A long time ago, maybe in the 1970s or 80s there was a little seed company called Seeds Bloom. I might have got them there, or maybe from SSE. They were red and tiny, I haven’t saved seed or planted them for years, but they grow wild in the weeds at the edge of the yard. I cull them out of the garden itself as soon as I can identify the tiny red fruits.

This year too, tiny yellow ones showed up. They were really good but like the red ones annoyingly small, I’m banishing them to the weeds too.

I don’t know what the original cross was but because of the orange and yellow color of some of them, I’m guessing Mr. Stripey or maybe Pineapple was probably the paternal side of the original cross and the little red currant the mother. I’m sure a large beefsteak was involved because I never grew any cherry tomatoes back then. I also don’t think I discovered them in the F1 because when I first found them there were two, a red one and an orange one. They looked like current plants, but the fruits were the size of marbles, rather than peas. The F1 must have just looked like a normal little red current.

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Having deliberately made three currant crosses I would say those first ones you found were likely the F1. Orange can be dominant.

I bet that seed company was Seeds Blum in Idaho- it was a very interesting company.

Seven years is what most tomato breeders do. I think there is an explanation that the vast majority of variation has disappeared after seven generations of selfing. However, it could be stable enough sooner or take longer depending on some factors. If you only care about a few traits you might be able to call the variety finished sooner as long as the plants are all stable for those traits. For example- I already have a F2 cross MMM x LA1375 brown rugose tolerance current x MMM x PH5 late blight resistant current that is potato leaf, bicolor, and blue skinned. That is all the visual traits I really care about possible from this cross, so in theory I could grow out the F3 third generation cross and release it in that form so that others could grow the cross in the F4. However, it would be unlikely for it to have the resistances from the two currant tomato ancestors in that form because it would only have 1/4 chance of having either of the resistances with a much smaller chance of having both. My solution to that is to offer it as part of a cherry tomato breeding grex. So sometimes with the Dwarf Tomato Project they went longer than seven generations. Why? Well two possible reasons- if you just happen to select an individual that is heterozygous for an important trait it may take a few more years to get a homozygous individual selected for that trait. Then there is always the possibility of subsequent natural crosses happening even with sibling plants unless you self and bag each generation.

In your case with the new variations, you keep seeing in your currant crosses. It could be that occasionally you get an older seed volunteering- they can live in the soil quite a few years. So earlier generations might appear and still be segregating. Then you might get the occasional new natural cross which would reset the clock essentially on stability each time. However, it is probably also true that some of the individuals are now stable varieties. Which could be tested simply by saving the seeds and looking for variation in the offspring.